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Day: July 2, 2016

“Something is always born in the silence.” Graffiti in central Petrograd, May 2016. Photo by Russian Reader

Osip MandelstamThe Egg

The egg was telling off the hen.
You hatched me crooked and askew,
The way you laid me was wrong.
The days you brooded me were few.
I was still cold, but you up and left.
Why were you utterly shameless?

Head of Karelia Alexander Hudilainen ordered the republic’s education minister to “tackle” the money teachers earn on the side working as tutors. He gave the order at a meeting of the anti-corruption committee, reports Rosbalt News Agency, quoting Andrei Rogalevich, chair of the committee on education, culture, sport, and youth policy in the region’s legislative assembly.

According to the MP, Hudilainen called the minister’s attention to a website advertising the services of tutors in different subjects. He had counted 180 tutors from Karelia on the website and suggested these educators had been concealing their extra income and not paying taxes on it.

Rogalevich said that Hudilainen’s approach, which defined educators as corrupt, was wrongheaded.

“Rather than [blaming] officials, whose work causes much more damage to the budget and the republic’s population, [Hudilainen blamed] people whose salary is many times smaller than the ‘people’s champions,'” the MP noted.

Rogalevich also recalled that Hudilainen had previously indulged in ambiguous remarks about teachers. For example, Hudilainen had proposed drawing up a “list of shame” of educators whose pupils had been left behind to repeat a grade. He argued that repeaters were the fault of teachers who had not given extra lessons to slow learners.

Translated by the Russian Reader

NB. The September 18, 2015, edition of MK Kareliareported that the average salary for high school teachers in Karelia in 2014 was 28,975 rubles per month. On December 31, 2014, the ruble traded at nearly 71 rubles to the euro, meaning the average Karelian teacher was then making around 400 euros a month.